Imagine that it’s 2045. You start hearing rumors from your wealthy friends about a mysterious company based on an undisclosed island that is offering an unprecedented service: the ability to genetically engineer your baby.
The baby will have some of your genetics and some genetics from a sperm or egg donor, selected by you. But the rest of your child’s genetic profile will be developed by science. These changes will make it impossible for your child to develop genetic diseases. They also allow you to customize your child according to dozens of characteristics, including level of intelligence, emotional disposition, sexual orientation, height, skin tone, hair and eye color, to name a few.
This raises unsettling philosophical questions for some customers. “When does my son stop being my son?” they ask corporate representatives. These cautious customers are reminded of how risky it is to reproduce the old way. The Better Genetics Corporation motto sums it up: “Only God plays dice – humans don’t have to play.”
This is the world described in a new science fiction series by Eugene Clark entitled “Genetic Pressure”, which explores the moral and scientific implications of a future in which projected babies are becoming a big industry. The first book begins with the story of Rachel, a renowned horse breeder who befriends a billionaire client and soon gets funding to visit the tropical island on which the Better Genetics Corporation is based.
There, corporate executives guide her through the process of raising a baby – an experience that feels like a fantastic mix between visiting a doctor and designing a luxury car. The series is told from multiple perspectives, serving as a deep dive into a complex moral web that today’s scientists may already be weaving.
[T]The introduction of projected babies would create a maze of philosophical dilemmas that society is just beginning to explore.
Case in point: In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he helped create the world’s first genetically modified babies. Using the CRISPR gene editing tool in embryos, He Jiankui modified a gene called CCR5, which allows HIV to enter and infect cells in the immune system. Its goal was to raise children immune to the virus.
It is not clear whether he succeeded. But what is certain is that the experiment shocked the international scientific community, which generally agrees that it is unethical to conduct gene editing procedures in humans, as scientists still do not fully understand the consequences.
“This experiment is monstrous,” said Julian Savulescu, a professor of practical ethics at Oxford University. The Guardian. “The embryos were healthy. No known disease. The editing of the gene itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early in life, including the development of cancer.”
It is important to note that He Jiankui was not treating a disease, but babies genetically modified to prevent the future contraction of a virus. These types of changes are inherited, which means that the experiment can have major effects downstream for future generations. The same would happen with an engineered baby industry, even though scientists can safely do so.
With important implications for inequality, discrimination, sexuality and our conceptions of life, the introduction of projected babies would create a maze of philosophical dilemmas that society is just beginning to explore.
Tribalism and discrimination
A question that the “Genetic Pressure” series explores: what would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with projected babies? As projected babies grow, they can be visibly different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This can generate resentment between groups – as in the series.
“[Designer babies] slowly discover that ‘everyone’, and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable, “author Eugene Clark said Big Think.” Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the projected babies. “
For example, a character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from “normal people” – they call her “soulless” and say she was “made in a factory”, a “consumer product”.
Would these divisions arise in the real world? The answer may depend on who can pay for designer baby services. If it’s just the ultra-rich, then it’s easy to imagine how being a projected baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which projected babies would have to rely on.
Even though people from all socioeconomic backgrounds may someday pay for projected babies, people who were born projected babies can struggle with difficult existential questions: Will they ever take full credit for the things they achieve or were born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate?
Dilemmas of sexuality
Sexuality presents another set of thorny issues. If an engineered baby industry ever allows people to optimize humans to be attractive, engineered babies can grow up and find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. This may not seem like a big problem.
But consider that if projected babies were ever to become the standard way of having children, there would necessarily be an interval of years when only a few people would have babies projected. Meanwhile, the rest of society would have children the old-fashioned way. Thus, in terms of attractiveness, society can see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearance between the two groups. “Normal people” can start to look increasingly ugly.
But ultra-attractive people who were born designed babies can also face problems. One may be the loss of body image.
When the projected babies grow up in the “Genetic Pressure” series, men look like all other men and women look like all other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because the parents of projected babies begin to follow trends, all choosing similar characteristics for their children: tall, athletic build, brown skin, etc.
Of course, the facial features remain relatively unique, but they are all more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes in sexual preferences.
“In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators,” he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically modified humans find especially attractive in the series.
But what about sexual relations between genetically modified humans and “normal” people? In the “Genetic Pressure” series, many “normal” people want to have children with (or at least have sex with) genetically modified humans. But a minority of projected humans are opposed to reproduction with “normal” people, and this leads to an ideology that regards projected humans as racially supreme.
Regulating design babies
On a political level, there are many open questions about how governments can legislate a world with projected babies. But it is not entirely new territory, considering the dark history of eugenic experiments in the West.
In the 20th century, the United States conducted several eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court decided that forcibly sterilizing the mentally disabled did not violate the Constitution. Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote: “… three generations of imbeciles are sufficient.”
After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the United States (although some states continued forced sterilizations in the 1970s). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concern about how gene editing technologies could revive eugenic nightmares of the 20th century.
Currently, the United States does not explicitly prohibit the editing of human germline genetics at the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively makes it illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo. Part of the reason is that scientists are still unsure of the unintended consequences of new gene editing technologies.
But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of an engineered baby industry, such as that of the “Genetic Pressure” series, would not necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it can also work to increase the occurrence of “desirable” characteristics.
If the industry did that, it would be an effective sign that opposites of these characteristics are undesirable. As the International Committee on Bioethics wrote, this “would jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the desire for a better and better life”.
“Volume of genetic pressure I: Baby steps” by Eugene Clark is now available.
